"No One's With the Calves" is a powerful film about a young woman, who - partly by bad luck, partly by lack of self-determination - is confined to live in a place where she does not seem to belong and from which she therefore wants to escape. But here again she is lacking a concrete plan and is condemned to just sit back and wait for a happy coincidence. This longed-for opportunity appears one day in the form of wind power worker Klaus, and when she willingly has rough sex with him in an abandoned barn, she might indeed see the possibility to get away from her rural and emotional wasteland. For Jan, the young man with whom and whose parents she lives on a farm, offers no help and does not fulfill her emotional needs. But neither does Klaus, who eventually disappears without leaving a trace.
In order to free herself from these living conditions, which are unhealthy for her in many ways, Christin, the protagonist, is ultimately left entirely on her own. And the final images of the film show that she has in fact succeeded: We see her driving away in her car towards an uncertain destination.
Following the protagonist's life in this desolate environment in every detail was in itself an overwhelming experience for me as a viewer. But I could not just stop there, I also felt the urge to read the novel which this film is based on, written by Alina Herbig and published in 2017. It is semi-biographical, because she spent part of her childhood and youth in such a rural area. And I even became more involved in the life and dreams of Christin, because not only does the novel provide a much deeper insight by offering a larger number of details, it also has the power of words, something which a cinematographic experience can hardly attain.
To make this literary experience more palpable, I will just translate and reproduce the last lines of the novel: "The sun is back and glittering in the drops on my engine hood. It's warm and dry inside. I roll down the window and drive off, past the blackberry bushes onto the new path. My tires lurch through the clay and I keep slipping off the track into the charred stubble, holding the steering wheel and steering against it. The cherry brandy bottle rocks back and forth and I want to stop again to have a little drink and think about everything again, but then I remember what Jan once explained to me when we were crossing the field with the tractor in spring. "You only get stuck if you drive too slowly." So I just keep getting faster."
And yes, reading this passage and seeing Christin speeding away in front of our inner eye, will give us some kind of hope for her future. Although now embracing the uncertainty of the unknown, the image of her driving faster, guided by Jan's advice to avoid getting stuck by moving forward, symbolizes Christin's determination to confront the challenges ahead and carve out a new path for herself.
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